On Thursdays, we feature a new cartoon—hand drawn by Summers—that offers a creative, satirical spin on Reconstruction history. Each cartoon is accompanied by brief commentary from the author/illustrator to help put things into context. These cartoons stimulate your brain, tickle your funny bone, and bring history to life in a whole new way.

Today’s feature: How the Lost Cause lost its way with Wade Hampton. (Click image for full size.)

“The Lost Cause Isn’t All That Lost. It Just Went into Redeemer Wade Hampton’s Whiskers and Couldn’t Find the Way Out.” A gray coat covered a multitude of causes. While Democrats and conservatives who “redeemed” the South from Republican rule in particular and democracy in general insisted that theirs would be a New South accepting the results of the Civil War, the kind of leaders they chose did not show it. South as well as North, voters chose figures with impeccable military records. In South Carolina, whites claimed to have elected onetime Confederate cavalryman Wade Hampton as governor in 1876 and with their paramilitaries, had him inaugurated. Hampton would graduate into the Senate a few years later. Hampton’s esteem outside the state did not rest on his war record, nor his reputation as a planter from a distinguished line of Wade Hamptons dating to Revolutionary War times. Rather, he was honored as a symbol of how far that Lost Cause had been tamed into something that northerners could find acceptable: love for the American flag and lip-service, at least, to fair treatment for African Americans. In Hampton’s case, it was more than lip-service: it was a liberalism that got him into serious political trouble with the rank and file. His willingness to appoint blacks to low-level government positions and preserve the basics of the school system, though, did not extend to protecting black voters’ political rights. Majority rule in South Carolina would have meant Republican control, and that outcome Hampton and his white-line critics alike were determined to prevent by whatever means of persuasion they could muster—homicidal ones included.

The oatmeal market suffered under the weight of too many competitors, with prices often falling below production costs. Crowell saw the solution in the mill’s overlooked Quaker trademark. And so, at a time when most consumers shoveled their oatmeal from open barrels, Crowell’s product appeared on shelves in sealed, two-pound boxes. Richly illustrated advertisements saturated local, then national, print media. Both package and ad featured the iconic Quaker, always smiling jovially and holding a scroll on which was written the single word “Pure.”

American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their “corporate evangelical” framework was a modern individualism understood primarily in terms of economic relations.

When Henry Parsons Crowell first entered the oatmeal business in 1882, few took him seriously. He knew nothing about the milling process, and his newly purchased mill in north-central Ohio was in laughable condition. Other millers considered Crowell a fool, and by the business logic of an antebellum economy, he was. But he could have cared less. Crowell was part of a phalanx of forward-looking businessmen that considered physical equipment secondary to a business’s intangible assets. It was a calculus that transformed the face of business over the next thirty years.

The oatmeal market suffered under the weight of too many competitors, with prices often falling below production costs. Crowell saw the solution in the mill’s overlooked Quaker trademark. And so, at a time when most consumers shoveled their oatmeal from open barrels, Crowell’s product appeared on shelves in sealed, two-pound boxes. Richly illustrated advertisements saturated local, then national, print media. Both package and ad featured the iconic Quaker, always smiling jovially and holding a scroll on which was written the single word “Pure.”

By 1891 Crowell had absorbed most of his competitors, but even his unparalleled success did not convince some of his more reluctant partners. By their older, more-traditional producer orientation, his promotional techniques were a half step away from outright chicanery. But as long as he sat atop the company’s rigid corporate structure, these opinions could not stop the sprawling nationwide operation from marching in tandem with his designs. In 1901 the permanency of his plan was marked by a newly organized corporation, the Quaker Oats Company. Crowell not only had dragged his own industry into the modern era, but he also was among the early pioneers that demonstrated these techniques could be applied to practically any consumer good. Through the trifecta of trademark, package, and promotion, a consumer society was born.

Crowell’s second major life project began before the ink was dry on Quaker Oats’s incorporation papers. And like his initial business investment, Crowell saw potential where others did not. The Moody Bible Institute was in crisis, hemorrhaging both money and goodwill. But it, too, had a key intangible asset: it was founded by Dwight L. Moody. Crowell became president and quickly incorporated his business ideas into this religious work without a second thought; Moody already had made borrowing such concepts unremarkable. But the business strategies themselves were new and thus would transform the purpose of Moody’s institution even as Crowell stayed true to the founder’s business spirit.

Henry Parsons Crowell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1855. His father, Henry Luther, a successful shoe merchant and devout Presbyterian, died of consumption when his son was only nine. The Crowell family was well-to-do. Unlike most dying fathers, the elder Crowell was greatly concerned that Henry and his two brothers “might be ruined by his prosperity” without his guidance. Henry attended the Greylock Institute, an elite boarding school in Massachusetts that prepared young men for business careers or an Ivy League education. He had plans to attend Yale and would have been classmates with Reuben Torrey, but at seventeen, he showed signs of his father’s consumptive lungs and returned to Cleveland to work the family business. Crowell now took a new interest in religion, especially after hearing Moody, who was not yet famous, give a Bible reading in a Cleveland church. He was taken by Moody’s approach to the Bible and never forgot the revivalist’s encouragement “to dream great things for God.” Moody’s unparalleled success confirmed that “God didn’t need his men educated, or brilliant, or anything else,” only “a man,” and Crowell determined to be one of them. He could not preach, but already he was confident he “could make money and help support the labors of men like Moody.” “If you will allow me to make money to be used in Your service,” he prayed to God, “you will have the glory.”[1]

After encountering Moody, Crowell’s reading of the Bible became radically personal and individualized. A passage from Job, “He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee,” became God’s personal promise to heal his lungs in seven years and then bring him success. Crowell had a simple confidence in the absolute reliability of this promise, but unlike Torrey, he did not care how God worked. His healing might well come by medical professionals and wealth by business acumen. Thus, when his doctor gave orders to spend the next seven years in the open air, it was like the voice of God. Crowell followed this medical advice to the letter, traveling extensively and continuing a life outdoors even though he felt fully healed a year early.[2] Upon returning home, he married his true love, Lillie Wick, in 1882. But when she died in 1885 before their first child was yet two, God’s promise that “no evil will touch thee” must have seemed exceedingly narrow.[3] His experience of a second tragic death inoculated him from any theology that equated sickness with sinfulness or promised absolute health to the faithful.

Crowell’s seven-year sojourn, which spanned the continent, provided him with a sense of the national market and shaped his approach to business. After four years of leisurely travel on both coasts, he turned to work. He made handsome profits on a farm in Fargo and horse breeding in South Dakota. In both cases, he narrowly averted natural disasters and realized his profits only by the resale of the businesses. It foreshadowed a career in which he profited more by extracting wealth from farmers than his own agricultural productivity. As he saw it, “I would rather get into a business where if I made a mistake, I could correct it.” Weather and crops could not be tamed.[4] Crowell’s demand for control was reflected in every enterprise that followed. Though his demeanor was quiet, prepossessing, and deliberate, he refused to compromise as long as he was convinced it was the “best” course of action. But he could just as stubbornly insist on abandoning projects or approaches when he concluded they had failed. He was, according to his biographer, a “Breakfast Table Autocrat”—a title Crowell seemed rather fond of.[5] And it was clearly displayed when he entered a new line of work with the proceeds from his second farm sale: the Quaker oat mill in Ravenna, Ohio.

Oat milling was a young industry in the 1880s. Though oats were used widely in farm-animal troughs, they were largely absent the breakfast table. The influx of German immigrants, who did eat oatmeal, led to the country’s first oat mill midcentury and a niche market that grew with the population. One among them, a former grocer named Ferdinand Schumacher, largely created the industry. He was the largest producer when Crowell purchased the Ravenna mill. Schumacher embodied an older business ideology, focused on productive capacity, efficiency, thrift, and bulk sales. It had made him a wealthy man.[6]

Crowell turned traditional business logic on its head. He bought the oat mill primarily for its two intellectual assets. The more conventional asset was an innovative processing patent to cut oats with blades, which was shared only by Schumacher. It produced a higher quality product with less waste, giving Crowell an advantage over most of his competitors. His business partner, the engineering and milling savant James H. Andrews, relentlessly improved designs. Following pioneers like Andrew Carnegie though still against conventional wisdom, Crowell also discarded existing equipment, regardless of condition, whenever doing so sufficiently increased efficiency. His second asset, the Quaker trademark, was the primary draw and the foundation of his unconventional strategy. Only a handful of other companies were selling branded products, packaged for retail sales and supported by aggressive marketing campaigns.

The validation of Crowell’s methods came with astounding rapidity. Within five years, his mill was the third-largest producer in the country, and within the decade, his $25,000 investment was worth half a million dollars, a twentyfold increase.[7] But Crowell suffered with everyone else under the crippling crisis of overproduction. He spearheaded an early attempt to control supply through a type of cooperative corporation. Leading producers, still independent, bought shares in a shell company designed to coordinate production levels, share profits, and buy up competitors. But by the late 1880s, it was falling apart as members fudged on their obligations and enterprising capitalists built new mills merely to extract money from the association. It was already unviable when the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed such combinations in 1890.

Success required control, Crowell concluded, and his next effort to tame the market in 1891 operated under that premise. A new corporation, the American Cereal Company, was formed by Crowell and five competitors. Its plan of operation, authored by Crowell, focused first on exerting autocratic control over all member mills through a single management structure. It forbade any entangling agreements with other competitors that might impede its complete corporate autonomy. Crowell’s plan also specified creating a reputation of unsurpassed quality. A diversification policy was designed to create stability against fluctuations in supply and demand for particular cereals and economic conditions in particular geographic locations, and to find uses for by-products or other unmet secondary businesses. Finally, it proposed aggressive marketing designed to “create a demand for cereals where none existed” using a “single trade name” under which all of its business would be done.[8] Crowell became the managing shareholder of the largest oatmeal producer in the country. Whatever his other competitors thought of him, he could no longer be ignored.

Crowell’s ideas were so counterintuitive to a producer orientation focused on minimizing costs that even profitability could not justify it. By the traditional logic, the company would be even more profitable if it stopped “wasting” money on expensive new machinery and frivolous advertising. Schumacher was Crowell’s most reluctant partner, joining the company only under duress, when he lost his new, uninsured mill to a catastrophic fire. A traditional proprietor, he reportedly “found it almost impossible to delegate authority and responsibility to subordinate hands,” even choosing to handwrite his business correspondence rather than use a secretary.[9] To the insult of losing control of his business were added what he thought were injurious promotional budgets that topped $500,000 by 1896.[10]

Unswayed by Schumacher’s protests, Crowell and a group of young executives pushed ahead, moving the company headquarters to Chicago, the agricultural commodity capital of the world, in 1898. But shortly after the move, Schumacher fomented a shareholder revolt with other conservatives and ousted Crowell from management. Crowell remained a major shareholder and thus able to comfortably support his daughter and new wife, Susan Coleman, a Vassar-educated teacher. But it was a stinging professional setback that left him literally with nothing to do.

As in earlier times of trial, Crowell focused on his faith. Living in the wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood adjacent to the Bible Institute, he met William Newell, the school’s associate superintendent and a leading dispensational advocate. At Henry and Susan’s invitation, Newell conducted a weekly Bible study on the Epistle to the Romans with a small group of their friends. Crowell was thoroughly taken by his dispensational system and abandoned his naïve plain reading. Under Newell’s influence, he also came to believe that he now had a responsibility to judge proper belief and practice using the tools of dispensationalism. Thus, while he once had been “friendly toward anything which affirmed itself ‘Christian,’” now he would refuse to blindly follow a minister’s views. Newell also introduced him to a new theological standard related especially to how the Bible was interpreted and a personal relationship to God. After this, Crowell became what his biographer called a “business-priest,” seeing business as more than “his way of making a living.” It had become “his altar where he serves the King.”[11]

Crowell’s newly invigorated faith changed neither his hardball business tactics, which he used to regain control of the American Cereal Company a year later, nor his novel business practices, which he immediately reinstituted once he returned to the helm. Schumacher ultimately admitted defeat, selling his shares and retiring. After this, Crowell’s policies were enshrined as the unfaltering rule at the newly reorganized Quaker Oats Company. His charitable giving was generous, as he had promised God, often equaling about 65 percent of his income. But his faith was congenial to fully enjoying what remained. He owned multiple palatial estates, shuttled a corps of servants across the country with the family, and hosted elegant dinners. He was still the president of Quaker Oats, but as it now required less of his time, he was ready to tithe not only his finances but also his business acumen.

Tamar W. Carroll, author of Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism, helped produce a video featuring women from the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, chapter of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women in the 1970s. The NCNW is the subject of two chapters of Mobilizing New York.

The National Congress of Neighborhood Women was founded by Jan Peterson in 1974–75 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to provide a voice for working class white women within the feminist and neighborhood movements. This video features black-and-white footage filmed by Christine Noschese in the mid to late 1970s of NCNW speak-outs and programs related to the group’s college program, which provided an opportunity for women to earn an associate’s degree in their neighborhood. Many of the multiracial group’s members were displaced homemakers and had not previously graduated high school.

Roman toilets, sewers, and drains are important archaeological features that embody ideas relevant to Roman society about cleanliness, physical health, concepts of beauty, and even notions of privacy. If toilets are excavated properly, they can provide valuable data even about the diet and socioeconomic status of users, divisions between households where they are found, construction methods, and maintenance.

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health.

Theoretical Frameworks for the Study of Toilets and Sewers

Roman toilets, sewers, and drains are important archaeological features that embody ideas relevant to Roman society about cleanliness, physical health, concepts of beauty, and even notions of privacy. If toilets are excavated properly, they can provide valuable data even about the diet and socioeconomic status of users, divisions between households where they are found, construction methods, and maintenance. While the understanding that outhouse archaeology is significant has made major strides in nineteenth-century American historical circles,[1] this perception has been slow to affect the archaeology of the Roman world. Part of the problem, of course, is that many Roman toilets and latrines were excavated more than a hundred years ago, as the science of archaeology was developing. As a result, no one was taking much care to stratify dung piles, to sort garbage from house toilets, or to remove privy deposits. Those early excavations sought the greatest art treasures, which were unlikely to be found in toilets.

Two theoretical frameworks have influenced my work on toilets and sewers. The first, termed “formation processes,”[2] argues that every archaeological feature, including a Roman toilet, correlates to human behaviors and activities that determine its construction, use, and ultimate abandonment. Construction, use, and abandonment are the three main processes captured by stratification within privy chambers. In other words, we can consider these processes as actual constructs of human behavior. While I am not here reporting on excavations that I myself have completed on particular toilets, I am able to refer to these human behaviors (construction, use, and abandonment) as they pertain to my effort to contextualize various toilets within one structure or within a city environment.

Closely connected to the theory of “formation processes” is the “social theory of architectural design,” which aims to uncover the human decisions and actions leading to the creation of an archaeological feature.[3] Toilets can thus be characterized as a necessary component of organizing and planning a habitation or a public area, just as sewers are necessary components of urban design. One of the first things to consider about toilets or sewers, therefore, is their location in the overall design of a building or layout of a city. Many human decisions had to be made prior to construction, and the archaeologist’s job is to work backward to determine them one by one. In the case of toilets, an archaeologist determines where the toilets are in a given building in relation to doorways, prevailing winds, property lines, dining areas, and places where food was prepared. We have enough private toilets now identified at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia to show that they were usually placed in or quite near kitchens. Their location in Pompeian houses seems to indicate no major concern about the avoidance of unpleasant odors near areas where food was prepared and little worry about sanitation.

As archaeologists begin to plot the placement of toilets across the landscape of an entire city, we can start to deduce certain aesthetic principles employed by urban planners or learn about local customs concerning where the toilets stand in relation to wells, water pipes, house cellars, cisterns, public areas, markets, and so on. We may discover that toilet planners were less concerned about easy access to their facilities than about distancing clients from those foul-smelling facilities, or we may discover the reverse, which does seem to be the case for most Roman private toilets. The anthropological theories that have helped to create sounder interpretations of nineteenth-century privies in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and elsewhere[4] need to be applied to Roman toilets and sewers. As much as possible, I use this methodology in this book.

While the builders of Roman public latrines, sewers, and water-supply systems in Italy during the first centuries B.C. and A.D. had little or no understanding of any “ideal” for public sanitation that we could accept in our world, investigation of sanitary installations and water systems has much to tell us about the experience of Roman daily life. In short, I hope to prove Barthes’s clever maxim: Geschrieben stinkt Scheiße nicht, “Writing about shit does not stink.”[5]

Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow is professor and chair of Classical Studies at Brandeis University and affiliate faculty in Anthropology, Fine Arts, Italian Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her book, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems, is now available.

[1] See Wheeler, K. “View from the Outhouse: What We Can Learn from the Excavation of Privies.” Historical Archaeology 34, no. 1 (2000): 1–2; Heirbaut, E., and K. Wheeler. “Multi-Disciplinary Research Questions and Methods, Taphonomy.” In Jansen, Koloski-Ostrow, and Moormann, Roman Toilets, 7–14. ↩

The public conversation that emerged in the Union states during the Civil War meshes well with these contemporary discussions. The greatest scorn was reserved for the dishonest charlatans who sought to profit from a war where they had not shared in the risks.

Today stories periodically surface of public figures who have been claiming—and even wearing—military decorations that they had not earned. Nearly ten years ago George W. Bush signed the “Stolen Valor Act of 2005” to punish such fraud. When that legislation was ruled unconstitutional, Congress passed a recrafted “Stolen Valor Act of 2013,” signed by Barack Obama. Clearly, profiting from falsified bravery was not something to be taken lightly.

During the election of 2004, one candidate’s military service in Vietnam came under such harsh scrutiny (I am no expert, but it seemed unfair and inaccurate to me), that the term “swiftboating” was born. He lost. The other candidate’s military service in the Texas National Guard received some scrutiny as well, although much of that seemed to concern whether he served properly as opposed to where he served. Meanwhile, pundits and antiwar critics coined the term “chickenhawk” to describe folks whose new enthusiasm for wars appeared unseemly in contrast to how they behaved when they were of military age.

The public conversation that emerged in the Union states during the Civil War meshes well with these contemporary discussions. The greatest scorn was reserved for the dishonest charlatans who sought to profit from a war where they had not shared in the risks. A few months after the disastrous First Battle of Bull Run, New York’s Vanity Fair published a public letter directed to a certain “young gentleman in Broadway” who had taken to walking up and down the city’s streets in a fake uniform, accepting admiring glances from men and women alike. “Don’t you think it is about time you took off that uniform?” the letter demanded. Although serving honorably in the Texas National Guard might generally have been seen as appropriate service during an unpopular war, Civil War cartoonists loved mocking men who served in the “Home Guard” while dining at fancy restaurants and staying clear of harm’s way.

Cartoonists for New York-based Vanity Fair enjoyed ridiculing the local elites who paraded around in uniforms but spent much for their time dining at the city’s fashionable Delmonico’s restaurant. This series of six drawings plays on the idea that these faux soldiers are engaged in defending “Fort Delmonico,” down to the “Grand Charge” at the end of the evening. Vanity Fair, November 23, 1861, 232. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

The Siamese twins had long been used ironically as symbols of American nationalism. The earliest pamphlet about the twins published in the United States in the early 1830s featured a title page image of a flying eagle carrying a banner that read "E Pluribus Unum," and beneath that was the phrase, "United We Stand." This appeared opposite a frontispiece that pictured the twins as dark-skinned boys wearing queues and loose Oriental garments. The 1836 pamphlet published under the twins' direction similarly featured a bald eagle clutching the national shield, beneath which were the words "Union and Liberty, one and inseparable, now and forever." Analyzing the Siamese twins and American identity, scholar Allison Pingree argued that these exhibition booklets, which juxtaposed the parlance of the day describing conjoinedness---"united brothers" or "united twins"---with the symbolism of the American eagle holding an "E Pluribus Unum" banner in its beak, were playing to political concerns of the period. Even as nationalists appropriated the bond to symbolize union, proponents of states' rights could claim that "connecting the states too closely was 'monstrous' and excessive."

Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as “freaks of nature” and “Oriental curiosities.” More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered twenty-one children between them. Though the brothers constantly professed their normality, they occupied a strange space in nineteenth-century America. They spoke English, attended church, became American citizens, and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet in life and death, the brothers were seen by most Americans as “monstrosities,” an affront they were unable to escape.

Joseph Andrew Orser chronicles the twins’ history, their sometimes raucous journey through antebellum America, their domestic lives in North Carolina, and what their fame revealed about the changing racial and cultural landscape of the United States. More than a biography of the twins, the result is a study of nineteenth-century American culture and society through the prism of Chang and Eng that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

The Siamese twins had long been used ironically as symbols of American nationalism. The earliest pamphlet about the twins published in the United States in the early 1830s featured a title page image of a flying eagle carrying a banner that read “E Pluribus Unum,” and beneath that was the phrase, “United We Stand.” This appeared opposite a frontispiece that pictured the twins as dark-skinned boys wearing queues and loose Oriental garments. The 1836 pamphlet published under the twins’ direction similarly featured a bald eagle clutching the national shield, beneath which were the words “Union and Liberty, one and inseparable, now and forever.” Analyzing the Siamese twins and American identity, scholar Allison Pingree argued that these exhibition booklets, which juxtaposed the parlance of the day describing conjoinedness—“united brothers” or “united twins”—with the symbolism of the American eagle holding an “E Pluribus Unum” banner in its beak, were playing to political concerns of the period. Even as nationalists appropriated the bond to symbolize union, proponents of states’ rights could claim that “connecting the states too closely was ‘monstrous’ and excessive.”[1]

This symbolism of the 1830s carried even more resonance in 1860. By this time, with the twins famously slaveholders and family men, representations of the twins and union were framed around the theme of a house divided, brother against brother, and the absurdity and tragedy of the moment. The political imagery began in July when the Louisville Journal took aim at discord in the Democratic Party. “It is said that Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, differ in politics,” the widely reprinted “news” item reported. “Both are veteran democrats, but Chang is now for Breckinridge, and Eng for Douglas.”[2] The idea that the twins, longtime Whigs, supported either Democratic candidate—Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who many southerners believed would not protect slavery, or Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who was staunchly proslavery—apparently proved too much for a Surry County neighbor. The twins “are not now and never have been Democrats [and] they say they never expect to be Democrats,” the neighbor wrote to the Fayetteville Observer, which had published the report from Louisville. Instead, the anonymous neighbor wrote, they both supported John Bell of Tennessee, a pro-Union slaveholder who was running under the Constitutional Union Party, a coalition of former Southern Whigs and Know-Nothings that performed well in northwestern North Carolina but did not carry Surry County.[3] True or not, the significance of these assertions is the symbolism each carries: In the first report, the brothers were at odds, spelling doom for party and country, whereas in the second, Chang and Eng saw eye to eye and backed a candidate who similarly promised union.

Stories that used the twins to illustrate the sectional divide continued to pit brother against brother. A New York Tribune report claimed to describe a confrontation that occurred between the twins while on exhibit at Barnum’s American Museum in early November. Chang, “a North Carolinian and a secessionist”—and apparently quarrelsome—first insisted that the ligament connecting the two brothers be painted black, suggesting to readers the centrality of slavery to the Union. When Eng voiced his preference for its natural color, Chang demanded that the union between the two brothers be dissolved. Eng, “of a calmer temperament,” persuaded Chang to wait at least until March 4, 1861, when the new president would be inaugurated. Meanwhile, a “Dr. Lincoln” was called in and offered the prognosis that the surgery would be “dangerous for both parties” and that “the union must and shall be preserved.”[4] The Baltimore American similarly predicted that separating this union would cause mortal injury. “If one of the Siamese brothers . . . rudely tears himself away, snapping asunder a bond that God and nature intended to be perpetual, he inflicts upon himself the same precise injury that he inflicts upon his fellow. . . . He commits fratricide and suicide at once.” A North Carolina newspaper reprinted the item, observing that the report “likens secession to a supposed separating of the Siamese twins.” The paper, however, titled the report “A Forcible Comparison,” suggesting that it did not see such dire consequences in the prospect of disunion.[5]

The most elaborate analogy came out of another state that straddled the growing divide between North and South. For border states such as Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky, which allowed slavery but, because of their strategic locations and profoundly divided populations, felt themselves tugged mightily in both directions, the imagery of the united twins perhaps had the greatest resonance: united they stand, divided they die. Missouri’s governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had led proslavery forces into “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s and now was determined for his state to “bind together in one brotherhood [with] the States of the South.” The military commander of the U.S. arsenal in St. Louis, Captain Nathaniel Lyon, had faced off against Jackson in Kansas and had pledged to keep Missouri aligned with the Union. That state was about to undergo as bloody an internal struggle as any other over the question of secession.[6]

It should come as little surprise, then, that a Missouri paper published one of the most violent and grotesque analogies pitting the twins against each other. In February 1861, St. Louis’s Daily Missouri Republican related an incident while stating that it “does not vouch for its truth.” At some unspecified point in the past, the paper reported, Chang had emancipated his slaves and wanted Eng to do the same. Eng refused and, what was more, wanted to use his slaves to work “an outlying lot, which had been considered more than the rest of their plantation a piece of common property.” Chang forbade this, and the two quarreled. Eng threatened to cut their tie; Chang defied him to do so. Eng insisted that Chang had wronged him and demanded redress; Chang argued that Eng had no cause to complain and refused to consider his brother’s demands. Finally, slaveholder Eng, “tired of remonstrating and offering compromises, suddenly cut the tie and the two stood apart, no longer one!” Chang fell upon his brother, and the two engaged in a bloody fight. “It is doubtful whether both, or indeed, whether either of them will survive the cruel and unnatural encounter,” the author commented.

On both sides, the families were the victims of the brothers’ falling out. Some troublesome neighbors robbed them of valuables, a “scoundrelly land-shark” had set up fictitious claims to their lands, and each brother was killing and crippling children of the other. Chang even set Eng’s slaves “to pillage him and take his life.” Throughout, Chang insisted that Eng was still tied to him, which Eng derided “as ridiculous and nonsensical.” “The warm pulsations, flesh and blood tie, which once joined them has been separated and can never be reunited, any more than the dead man can be brought to life,” Eng told his brother. Of course they could be joined once again, Chang responded, suggesting that a rope could be tied around Eng’s neck and Chang’s waist, and if Eng failed to follow the path set by his brother, Chang could drag him along. This proposal suggested to doctors that Chang’s mind was “disordered.”[7]

Although the analogy to the greater sectional conflict was obvious, there were also in this report some notable parallels with the lives of the twins and families. They had, for instance, divided their estates, both in slaves and in property. This was a legal divorce of sorts, which some observers pinned on conflicts between the families and others on overcrowding. In fact, the division of estates codified living arrangements that had been in place since the years immediately following their weddings.[8] The report’s drift into fiction was equally obvious. Of course the twins had not killed any of their children or, as far as we know, come to physical blows of any sort. And, for those paying attention to the several analogies appearing in newspapers around the country, there were clear inconsistencies. The Missouri example posed Eng as the intransigent slaveholder, while the Maryland paper had placed Chang in that role. The significance of these analogies was not their relation to the actual lives of the Bunker brothers but the metaphor the united twins offered for a nation in crisis.

For readers of the St. Louis Republican, the coming war between the states—as well as the ongoing battle within Missouri and the recent memories of Bleeding Kansas, in which many Missourians participated—provided the real framework for this mournful account of the twins and their families. The fears about deadly violence were clear, pitting brother against brother, of course, but also involving uncles killing nephews and family members unleashing slaves against other family members. And for what? For outsiders to come and lay claim to the land, to plunder and pillage while the women and children were weakened and the brothers were mortally wounded. The article came down harshly on Unionists, that is, Chang. They placed onerous demands on slaveholders, they clung stubbornly to their own beliefs, and their proposals for reunion amounted to little more than placing a leash on a disobedient mutt. But secessionists, that is, Eng, received criticism as well. They were hotheads who acted rashly and, in rushing to sever the tie that bound the two together, mortally wounded each and unleashed misery on their families.
The Republican concluded:

All the real friends of these unfortunate parties are much concerned at this unhappy quarrel and its results. How it will finally terminate cannot be wholly foreseen. But this case seems to be hopeless. The constitution of neither of them can probably withstand the injuries and sufferings they have incurred; and that which should, and with an ordinary exercise of moderation and good sense would have remained a goodly heritage for their children, will be divided among strangers.[9]

The article spoke fondly of the twins, of the promise of a secure and bountiful future they had offered to their families. The united brothers had become symbols of the American union and the promise it offered to its citizens. Ultimately, however, the twins were scorned; they had become symbols of the nation’s disunion.

In truth, the twins themselves did not separate; their union held. But as the nation approached its greatest crisis, the twins made their stand clear, hurrying from California to North Carolina, to their plantations, their slaves, and their families. The Bunkers were southerners, and they would remain southerners after the war, at home and abroad.

[4] This story first published in the New York Tribune was widely reprinted in such papers as Boston Daily Advertiser, November 13, 1860; Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, November 14, 1860; Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1860; and Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, November 17, 1860. ↩

On Thursdays, we feature a new cartoon—hand drawn by Summers—that offers a creative, satirical spin on Reconstruction history. Each cartoon is accompanied by brief commentary from the author/illustrator to help put things into context. These cartoons stimulate your brain, tickle your funny bone, and bring history to life in a whole new way.

Today’s feature: the messy politics of Reconstruction-era Arkansas. (Click image for full size.)

“1874 Arkansas Politics Is to Politics What Jackson Pollock Is to Portrait Painting.” Arkansas politics had always had the rest of the country bafflingly confused. By 1874, it made no sense to anyone outside the state. The regular Republican faction, known as the Minstrels, had run a wartime Unionist, Elisha Baxter for governor; Democrats had adopted a dissident radical Republican, Joseph Brooks, as their candidate. In November, the voters did not make the result; the vote-counters did. Backed by the legislature and the courts, Minstrels declared Baxter elected. Little did they realize that he would sell them out (but then, little did Baxter realize that eventually the Democrats would sell him out, too!). When Baxter’s apostasy became clear, Minstrel leaders had the state supreme court declare Brooks the winner after all. With a militia at his back, Brooks—now backed by most Republicans—overthrew Baxter—now backed by most Democrats. The brief civil war that followed, the Brooks-Baxter War, ended in the president throwing his weight on Baxter’s side, dooming Reconstruction in Arkansas. By the time the president had unscrambled who was on whose side and decided that Brooks may have been elected after all, it was too late to do anything about it.

Southern Cultures is now multimedia! Download the app for your tablet, and in addition to all the great content available in the print journal, you can also enjoy embedded audio, video, and links to additional resources.

Southern Cultures is now multimedia! Download the app for your tablet, and in addition to all the great content available in the print journal, you can also enjoy embedded audio, video, and links to additional resources. For a limited time, when you download the app you’ll get the Summer 2015 issue FREE! Available from the AppStore and Google Play.

One Supreme Court decision announced this June received limited notice, in part because it came out the same week as momentous decisions on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and following the horrific tragedy at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. But the Court’s decision in a fair housing dispute, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs et al. v. Inclusive Communities Project, merits serious attention as LGBTQ activists and their allies move on to tackle employment and housing discrimination and as the momentum from the campaign to remove the Confederate flag from public places turns toward a broader agenda. The ruling could be especially significant for activists working to end the disproportionate placement of polluting factories and hazardous waste facilities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

We welcome a guest post from Ellen Griffith Spears, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city’s historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston’s battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

In today’s post, Spears comments on the recent Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project.

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One Supreme Court decision announced this June received limited notice, in part because it came out the same week as momentous decisions on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and following the horrific tragedy at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. But the Court’s decision in a fair housing dispute, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs et al. v. Inclusive Communities Project, merits serious attention as LGBTQ activists and their allies move on to tackle employment and housing discrimination and as the momentum from the campaign to remove the Confederate flag from public places turns toward a broader agenda. The ruling could be especially significant for activists working to end the disproportionate placement of polluting factories and hazardous waste facilities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

The Inclusive Communities case concerned whether housing for low-income persons in Dallas should be built in the city or in the suburbs. A 5-4 majority of the Court acknowledged that segregated housing persists and reaffirmed the use of disparate-impact analyses—statistical findings that institutional policies have the effect of discriminating whether or not the agency or party in question intended to do so—as a way to tackle bias in housing.

By contrast, proving discriminatory intent or motive can be difficult.The shooter in the Charleston assault blatantly espoused his racist motivations, but much systemic discrimination hides behind facially neutral policies. But the effects—patterns of discrimination—can be measured. Moreover, the Court stated, disparate-impact analyses help uncover “unconscious prejudices and disguised animus that escape easy classification as disparate treatment.” The Court specifically affirmed a lower court’s criteria to be considered in siting decisions, including “disqualify[ing] sites that are located adjacent to or near hazardous conditions, such as high crime areas or landfills.”

In Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, I document decades of “slow violence” from chemical exposures that disproportionately affected African American residents and working-class whites in the Alabama city of Anniston. In this segregated community, proximity to the polluting plant was a key indicator of exposure to PCBs, the toxic chemicals. Anniston residents won a major legal settlement after their neighborhood and their bodies were polluted by the chemicals. But that victory came only after the damage—to residents’ health and to their homes and community—was done.

Environmental justice advocates have attempted to employ Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in government-supported programs, to challenge practices by private entities and government that have resulted in discriminatory exposure to toxic hazards, even absent demonstrable racial animus. EPA regulations prohibit discriminatory effects unless they are “justified and there is no less discriminatory alternative.” But success in such cases has been limited.

The Inclusive Communities case focused on the precise language of the Fair Housing Act, and the Court retained several limitations on such claims. But the Court’s decision to continue to take disparate impact into account suggests an avenue for raising broader claims of discrimination that must be pursued if we genuinely want systemic race and gender bias to end.

On Thursdays, we feature a new cartoon—hand drawn by Summers—that offers a creative, satirical spin on Reconstruction history. Each cartoon is accompanied by brief commentary from the author/illustrator to help put things into context.

In today’s cartoon: the controversy over the spoils system during the Reconstruction period. (Click image for full size.)

“The Grannies.” By the 1870s, the spoils system had become a national scandal. Among those crying out the loudest were the so-called Liberals, most of them Republicans with growing doubts about Reconstruction and a hardening certainty that a government of greed and grab was not only inefficient and immoral, but a threat to the Republic. Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, Edwin Godkin of the Nation, George William Curtis of Harper’s Weekly and Missouri senator Carl Schurz were among the leading critics of politics as usual, personified by such figures as Senators John “Black Jack” Logan of Illinois and Roscoe Conkling of New York, as well as Congressman Benjamin F. “Spoons” Butler of Massachusetts. That all of them were hearty supporters of Reconstruction only made them more offensive to Liberals. If civil service reformers saw them as the epitome of self-interest in government, the bosses saw their antagonists as dilletantes, the “unco’ guid,” as Conkling would sneer, and, in their daintiness about political methods, un-American and unmanly. “When Doctor Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling snarled, “he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.’…They forget, that parties are not built up by deportment or by ladies’ magazines or gush!”

The sources were my friends, and I took pleasure in going into archives and looking at papers without a great deal of preparation. The mentalités scholarship allowed me to think about what it might have meant when diaries said virtually the same things except on Sundays, or when diarists listed the numbers of ducks they killed, or when they wrote at length about circus visits, or when young women wrote, night after night, “Did my work today,” and meant they sewed, darned, or knitted. Sources were often surprising. I had never heard of ring and lance tournaments before they appeared in some letters. An otherwise frustrating trip to Savannah yielded the diary of a teenager who worried about the ramifications of making fudge on Sunday. I certainly recall finding a letter at the Southern Historical Collection in which a young man bragged about having sex with a young woman in a buggy after Sunday night services. And sources taught me things I then needed to analyze, like the self-conscious modernity of county fair organizers or the decline in church disciplinary proceedings or the practice of town women staying away from town squares when rural men invaded on court days and Saturdays.

What inspired the book the most, and what I remember loving most about the process, was the research—weeks and months in papers in archives in university and public archives all over the South. Diary after diary, personal letters, memoirs, sermons and church discipline records, lots of newspapers, and scattered organizational records. County fair programs. The cockfighting publication Grit and Steel. Publications of temperance and other reform organizations. Toward the end of the project I taught myself to look up state laws.

The sources were my friends, and I took pleasure in going into archives and looking at papers without a great deal of preparation. The mentalités scholarship allowed me to think about what it might have meant when diaries said virtually the same things except on Sundays, or when diarists listed the numbers of ducks they killed, or when they wrote at length about circus visits, or when young women wrote, night after night, “Did my work today,” and meant they sewed, darned, or knitted. Sources were often surprising. I had never heard of ring and lance tournaments before they appeared in some letters. An otherwise frustrating trip to Savannah yielded the diary of a teenager who worried about the ramifications of making fudge on Sunday. I certainly recall finding a letter at the Southern Historical Collection in which a young man bragged about having sex with a young woman in a buggy after Sunday night services. And sources taught me things I then needed to analyze, like the self-conscious modernity of county fair organizers or the decline in church disciplinary proceedings or the practice of town women staying away from town squares when rural men invaded on court days and Saturdays.

The sources helped organize the material by time, place, and gender. I spent hours just exploring and taking notes, and when I sat down to write, the sources, with some help from gender studies scholarship, told me to look for where men and women were located when they acted in particular ways. Twenty-five years later, the book’s organization still appeals to me, with chapters on The Field, The Town: Main Street, The Town: Professional Entertainment, The Plantation, The Farm, The Home, The Church, The Revival Meeting, and then two chapters on reform. Each chapter tried to detail the groups that experienced life in certain spaces, who was there, who wasn’t, and what went on there.

Another thing I still like about the book is that its primary tension pitted two things most scholars do not find very attractive. The spaces divided people with aggressive, competitive, self-consciously manly forms of recreation and spaces where people believed in the harmony of evangelical home life. So, the tension was not between people scholars tend to appreciate and those who they don’t—it was between two tendencies or cultural forms we as scholars tend to find troubling, even offensive. It is a book without clear heroes, and it tries to think along with people we could easily see only as villains or victims. I admire scholars who have a subject—great reformers or great musicians, for example—that they love, but I approached my topic with grumbling mixed emotions.

The book is not at its best at studying causation or change over time. If it has strengths, maybe they lay in the effort to fit together the cultural forces in southern life. I was influenced by anthropologist Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process, which studied cultural life as a set of transitions between opposing cultural forces. Sometimes people went from structured order to unstructured moments of uncertainty with ease; other times the process revealed or created problems. So, one thesis of my book is that the forces in southern cultural life existed in an awkward, uncomfortable, sometimes combustible balance, and that balance became more difficult to continue in the early twentieth century. Prohibition laws passed in the early 1900s marked a turning point. I started the project expecting that a growing secularism would emerge as the main story. Instead, I found that as certain forms of behavior became harder for evangelicals to avoid noticing or suffering from their effects, many of them turned more toward organized, legal responses.

]]>http://uncpressblog.com/2015/07/08/ted-ownby-on-subduing-satan-25-years-later/feed/0Kim Tolley: What If There Had Never Been a Confederate Battle Flag?http://uncpressblog.com/2015/07/06/kim-tolley-what-if-there-had-never-been-a-confederate-battle-flag/
http://uncpressblog.com/2015/07/06/kim-tolley-what-if-there-had-never-been-a-confederate-battle-flag/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 14:09:46 +0000http://uncpressblog.com/?p=18958New from UNC Press Blog

During recent debates over the flag, the history of the South sometimes appears as a straightforward tale of unrelenting proslavery leading up to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. But there's another aspect of southern history that is sometimes overlooked—the antislavery of the early antebellum era.

We welcome a guest post from Kim Tolley, author of Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1845 (October 2015). Susan Nye Hutchison (1790-1867) was one of many teachers to venture south across the Mason-Dixon Line in the Second Great Awakening. From 1815 to 1841, she kept journals about her career, family life, and encounters with slavery. Drawing on these journals and hundreds of other documents, Kim Tolley uses Hutchison’s life to explore the significance of education in transforming American society in the early national period. Tolley examines the roles of ambitious, educated women like Hutchison who became teachers for economic, spiritual, and professional reasons.

In today’s post, as public debates over the Confederate battle flag intensify in the wake of the white supremacist killing of church leaders and parishoners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, Tolley highlights the little-known history of antislavery sentiment in early 19th-century southern Protestant churches.

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“The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” With these words, North Carolina activist Bree Newsome bravely scaled the flagpole on South Carolina’s capitol grounds and brought down the Confederate battle flag. Her act of civil disobedience focused attention on the flag’s meaning in modern American society.

But what if there had never been a Confederate Battle Flag? What if the Southern states had abolished slavery before mid-century? What if the Civil War had never begun? Impossible, it seems. Yet for many men and women just after the American Revolution, the complete abolition of slavery seemed plausible.

During recent debates over the flag, the history of the South sometimes appears as a straightforward tale of unrelenting proslavery leading up to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. But there’s another aspect of southern history that is sometimes overlooked—the antislavery of the early antebellum era. Southern antislavery may have been a minority perspective in the early national period, but it had deep roots in the region.

In response to the antislavery stance of the major Protestant churches and the ideas embedded in the Declaration of Independence, slave liberations in the South reached unprecedented levels just after the Revolution. Virginians freed about 15,000 slaves from 1782 to 1808, and those liberations accounted for nearly 60 percent of the free black population growth in the state during that period.

When a young white Presbyterian convert named Susan Nye traveled south from rural New York to teach in North Carolina in 1815, she regularly went into the streets of Raleigh to pray with slaves and free black men and women without sparking any criticism from white residents in the town. After moving to Georgia in 1823 and marrying, she opened her kitchen to an independent congregation of slaves and free blacks. This small church conducted its own services free of oversight by whites until 1831, when the local authorities banned such meetings.

As an educator, Susan Nye Hutchison kept antislavery sentiment alive in classroom lessons on moral philosophy. William Paley’s text, which included a short chapter on slavery, appeared in the published curriculum of Hutchison’s schools in North Carolina and Georgia without sparking any concern from the southerners whose daughters enrolled. Paley argued that slavery was against the laws of nature and could not be justified by the Bible.

Hutchison’s actions had the support of her church in those years. In 1818, southern ministers unanimously endorsed an antislavery statement in the national Presbyterian Church: “We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature, as utterly inconsistent with the law of God which requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ, which enjoin that ‘all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.'” This resolution, which remained in force until the division of the Church twenty years later, became known as the 1818 Expression of Views.

However, in the early 1830s, clergymen in the major Protestant churches began to advance theological arguments in support of slavery. At around the same time, Paley’s moral philosophy text disappeared from southern classrooms. Southern Presbyterian ministers were soon describing the church’s Expression of Views as “the obnoxious resolutions.” By 1838, when the Presbyterian Church divided, much of its own history had been rewritten. Proslavery clergymen claimed the church’s earlier antislavery stance had been entirely the work of northern men, even though—as South Carolina minister John Witherspoon later recalled—the Expression of Views “was penned, and advocated, and voted for, by Southern men.”

But what if the major Protestant churches had chosen a different path? What if they had followed the Quakers and made membership contingent on the emancipation of slaves? What if their ministers had continued to emphasize the evils of slavery and promote manumission? What if they had never begun to argue that the Bible justified slaveholding? What if the emancipationists among them had set aside their fear, stood up, and spoken out?

Asking “what if” is not a fruitless exercise. Nothing in history is preordained. Societies, like individuals, often face critical crossroads where actions and decisions can play out in unforeseen ways. Looking back in time and reflecting on the paths not taken can remind us of the dangers of political lethargy and the potential of social action. Antebellum Americans utterly failed to solve the problem of slavery, the greatest moral and political issue of the age. Today we grapple with racism, violence, and social inequality. The problems may seem daunting, but change is only possible when we embrace hope and courage, as Newsome did when she called out, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”